Ever gotten mad when someone gave you some tough feedback—sure that they are wrong, evil, or mean-spirited? You’re ready with a defensive retort: “Oh, yeah? What about you?” Then you blast back with a laundry list of their faults???
We just started exploring the principle of truth last week. See if you can relate to this brief excerpt from one of best seller, Dr. Judith Wright’s books, The One Decision: Make the Single Choice that Will Lead to a Life of MORE, from her chapter on truth. |
Don’t Shoot the Messenger—
Accepting the Truth About Yourself
“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
—Gloria Steinem, journalist and feminist leader
AT FIRST IT PISSES YOU OFF
If you can’t admit your foibles, or the parts of you that embarrass you, or if you can’t see the truth you would really rather avoid, you will have a difficult time if someone else brings these things to your attention. If you are protecting your false, ideal public self, you won’t accept the feedback when someone points it out to you. You will openly defend (or silently deny) and be reactive toward them. You may even judge them as mean, or leave the relationship entirely because you fear facing truths that seem too difficult for you to hear.
THEN IT SETS YOU FREE—FREE TO KNOW AND ACCEPT YOURSELF
Yet, if we can accept truthful feedback without “shooting the messenger,” we are freed from having to defend ourselves. It helps us accept ourselves and heal the parts we have been trying to hide.
Receiving feedback can be challenging when that feedback goes beyond our projected false self and doesn’t match how we like to think we are. The next time you get some feedback that may pierce your shell, try these tips to embrace truth in those moments:
- Acknowledge the truth. Pause and check in with yourself. Did you just experience your heart racing? Face flush? Sweating? Immediate urge to defend? Acknowledge that there is a part of you that desperately doesn’t want to be found out or discredited, and be compassionate with that part.
- Find what about the feedback is (or could be) true. Rather than dismissing the feedback out of hand because you don’t like it, ask yourself what the other person observed in you that had them form that judgment or come to that conclusion. You may be served. Ask them questions about how they see you—and listen to their response, as hard as it may be sometimes.
- Just know, the more we want to defend, the more something is true that we do not want to see. Defenses are against our own thoughts and judgments of ourselves we fear acknowledging.
- Thank them for their feedback. Even if your first urge is to be seething and dismissive, it’s possible that it took a measure of trust and safety in your relationship to say what they said. (It’s also possible, if you’re talking with someone who tends to be overly critical, that they will be disarmed by gratitude.)
LiveWright and Live Truthfully,
Dr. Bob & Dr. Judith